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- The Daily Mail has just published an article on a supposedly scientific study which concludes that watching nature shows such as those by David Attenborough and David Cox reinforces religious views and increases questioning of science's most controversial ideas.
Heading for extinction due to poaching From this Daily Mail report the study appears flawed, and inspired by leftist politics.- Enough damage is already being done at school with children as young as seven being indoctrinated on a variety of human sexual activities, with the endorsement of deviancies at a time when their minds should be left free to dream and discover the magic of childhood and the natural world.
- Modern kids become TV and computer addicts as toddlers, and so they miss tens of thousands of hours when they could be playing outdoors.
David Attenborough
with a friend - If you have children, I hope you will encourage them to watch documentaries that present the natural world as something awe inspiring, and where animals deserve our admiration, empathy, and respect. Unfortunately, many disagree.
- Some object to this point of view because they can't rape and pillage the environment fast enough.
- Others because they see the belief in God and the sacredness of nature as an obstacle to their efforts of placing their atheist leftist ideology and leftist leaders on a pedestal.
- Others object to religions such as Christianity and Judaism because they are a bulwark against the ongoing Islamization of the West, where people with no values are passively allowing themselves to be invaded and colonized by Islam.
- Leftist moral relativism has neutered western populations to the point where they can't even identify, much less name, their enemy.
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One notion to keep in mind is that belief in God and religiosity are not equivalent.David Cox - One can believe in God and not follow any religion whatsoever. They are not the same thing at all. Religions have been constructed by men, while the belief in God is innate.
- I'm not a religious person but I experience the presence of God in many ways, particularly in the mystery and awesomeness of nature. I love to read about science more than any other subject.
- By showing students nature documentaries prior to asking them about religion and science, the study used a rather questionable method, since it cannot prove a direct connection between the documentary experience and their beliefs.
- The subjects' previous attitude towards God and religion was already there, formed by their own temperament and upbringing.
- All the study manages to suggest is that nature shows MIGHT reinforce their notion that there is something divine in the structure of nature and life itself.
- By the way, I used the words "scientific dogma" deliberately. Scientific "truth" is being revised all the time, but the scientific establishment treats the latest truth as dogma. In this they are similar to a religion. Scientists who question the current scientific dogma are ostracized, their work does not get published, they are refused grants, and they may even lose their jobs.
Daily Mail: Sir David Attenborough and Brian Cox's TV nature shows are 'putting viewers off science' because the beautiful scenes reaffirm belief in God.
- New study suggests nature programmes are putting viewers off science
- It found programmes like BBC's Planet Earth can also influence religiosity
- Religious people often 'have faith reaffirmed by the beauty on the screen'
- The study, published in the journal Emotion, was carried out by Claremont McKenna College in California.
TV shows designed to inspire awe at the natural world could make viewers less inclined to believe scientific theories about the world, a study suggests.
It found religious people who watch programmes such as BBC’s Planet Earth, presented by Sir David Attenborough, are more likely to have their faith in God reaffirmed by the beauty they see on screen.
Atheists, meanwhile, are more likely to believe scientific theories that involve order rather than randomness in the universe.
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But TV series like those presented by Brian Cox and Sir David Attenborough might actually be turning us off science.
Atheists who watch programmes like the BBC’s Planet Earth are more likely to believe theories about our existence that involve order rather than chaos.
Religious people are more likely to have their faith in God reaffirmed by the beauty they see before them, the research said.
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The study may be surprising to fans of shows like those the BBC routinely screens during prime time TV.
With their sweeping camerawork and voice overs from Sir David, such programmes have become a hit with viewers and made him and Mr Cox household names.
For the study, the researchers asked 127 students to describe how much they believed in religion and the supernatural then showed them three five minute nature videos.
The films were designed to inspire awe, amusement, or no emotion in particular.
The footage was from the Planet Earth series, the amusing films were clips from the BBC’s Walk on the Wild Side and the emotionally neutral video was a news clip from 1959.
Afterwards the participants were asked 10 questions about science such as: ‘We can only rationally believe in what is scientifically provable’.
The results showed that those who believed in religion recorded a reduction in their belief for science compared with those who watched the other two kinds of videos.
David Attenborough introduces us to animals and places we may never see,
all in a spirit of wonderment.
The researchers conducted a second experiment via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk survey website with 364 participants and tweaked it slightly.
Participants shown the same films and were asked to rate on a scale of one to six how much they agreed with statements like: ‘The events that unfold in this world can be entirely explained by science’.
Other statements were: ‘The principles of science provide order and predictability to the world’ and: ‘The course of evolution follows certain paths, and is not just the result of random processes’.
The results showed that, among religious people, feeling a sense of awe decreased their sense of a scientific order.
Among non-religious people they were more likely to support a theory of evolution that emphasised order over randomness.
The study, published in the journal Emotion, was carried out by Claremont McKenna College in California.
The report said that ‘these findings suggest that awe drives theists’ away from scientific explanations’.
It read: ‘It seems that awe attracts nontheists to scientific explanations to the extent that science is framed as explicitly providing order and explanation and eschewing the importance of randomness in the process (disconcerting to those interested in promoting an accurate understanding of evolution).’
Such ambivalence about God is, rather surprisingly, shared by the presenters of the very shows that the test participants watched.
Sir David has described himself as an agnostic rather than an atheist and believes that there may be a God.
The 90-year-old has told BBC Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs that the existence of God would not be ‘inconsistent’ with the theory of evolution.
Mr Cox, who Sir David has described as his heir apparent, has said that he his not anti-religion though he is ‘anti-maniac’.
The former keyboard player in pop band D:Ream has said that he is not religious but believes ‘there’s a naivety in saying there is no God’.
Sources
About Journal EMOTION
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